Gardens, the new studio founded by industry veterans and brothers Chris and Stephen Bell, who’ve been behind such games as Journey, What Remains Of Edith Finch, Sky and Blaseball has announced its partnership with coherence, a company that’s built multiplayer network technology designed to allow any and all developers to create massive multiplayer games.
“Why couldn’t one person build an MMO?” is the question that coherence co-founder Tadej Gregorčič puts to his fellow co-founder Dino Patti and the audience, in a video announcing the launch of the 1.0 version of their multiplayer network engine.
It currently supports Unity, and the team is working to add Unreal Engine support as well. You can check out everything coherence is about at its website and the behind-the-scenes video with its founders.
Making MMO’s, or pretty much any big-scale online multiplayer title has remained a task that only the biggest studios can reasonably tackle. It’s not impossible for indie or even solo developers, but it’s a lot more challenging.
What coherence has created with its engine allows for developers, even solo devs, to create multiplayer games as big as they like, and made it much easier in the process.
This announcement shows that while we’ve not seen any major title release yet using coherence, storied indie developers like the Bell brothers and their new team at Gardens using it to create their debut title already says a lot.
Gardens has been using coherence from the beginning for its debut project, which means the demo that Gardens showed off at GDC to secure $31.3 million in funding was created with coherence.
Founders Patti and Gregorčič hope that coherence can open the doors to any developer who wishes to create a multiplayer game.
Single-player titles aren’t going away anytime soon, but the biggest games in the industry are all online multiplayer titles, and almost every big publisher has a AAA multiplayer game on their docket.
If coherence can create an industry where we are seeing big multiplayer titles crop up from indie developers who will almost inherently be taking more risks with their game design and mechanics than we’d ever see from the likes of Activision or EA, that sounds plenty more exciting than what we have now.
This partnership with Gardens could potentially be the first game that is able to use coherence and create a game that is able to compete with the biggest online games in the industry.
Source – [Gardens Press Release]